Chapter Thirty-Eight Mama’s Good Girl When I open my eyes, I’m in my bed. Not in Cain’s bed. Not my bed on the second story of Madam Karina’s home. Not even on the mattress I claimed in Detroit.
I’m in my bed at my parent’s house. My father is already gone. I sense his absence like a missing foot. Like someone has asked me to walk without it for the first time and they say, stupidly, can you feel the difference?
It’s light out. Sunshine pouring through my lace window drapes like a rainbow arching over a funeral procession.
“Domino, are you awake?”
My mother’s voice. It comes from down the hall.
I curl into a ball and turn my back to my bedroom door. She knocks on it once before opening it.
Would you look at that respect?
She moves inside my personal space, and I clench my eyes shut. It’s been forty-nine days since he left us. Forty-nine days since my father decided he wanted a new life. Mama moves closer, and I try not to breathe. Ever since he left, she’s been cracking like an egg on the side of a mixing bowl, her innards running yellow down the lip.
“I got us some things when I went out.” Her voice is a songbird warbling a falsetto tune.
I don’t want to hear about the things she got. They won’t be good things. They won’t be a new green jacket with gold buttons or a pint of apple juice or body lotion that smells like grated lemon.
They will be bad things.
“Don’t you want to see?” she says, sweetly. “We’re so much closer to completing our plan now.”
Her plan. Not our plan.
“Come on, sweetie. Don’t you want to make me happy?” She pauses for effect. “We only have each other now.” Her hand comes to rest on my arm. I don’t flinch because, at the end of the day, she is my mother. “Who would you have if not for me?”
I open my eyes and sigh.
She takes my sigh as the encouragement she needs.
“Here, I’ll lay them on your pillow.”
I close my eyes again when she leans over my frame. The mattress groans against the added weight, and then she’s gone. Backing out of my room, closing the door behind her. I grit my teeth, remind myself I am brave and good and would never let a man push me around. All the things my mother has told me.
When I open my eyes, I see the gift she’s left me.
Two things.
A pair of surgical gloves.
And a shiny, happy knife.